14 August 2010

An adult mind knows better, and believes that stories are "just stories".

An enlightened mind knows that stories, narratives and myths don't describe how the world works, but precisely and accurately describe psychological processes - and therefore explain how people work.

The commies out there will have noted that this is a pretty neat Hegelian dialectic, with the last step being the negation of the negation (also in the sense that an enlightened being will have to have both adult and child minds operating in complementary fashion). The story world is a refraction of the Real World of Horrible Jobs. The menu is not just words on paper, even though you can't eat it; if you can use it properly, you can gain delicious things to eat.

07 August 2010

... because mass media, and all the other ideological apparatuses of capitalist hegemony, deliberately induce bad mental health in the entire population - narcissism, anxiety disorders, Freudian projection and paranoia are the preferred implants of the day - to keep workers working, consumers spending, and the inevitable explosions of hatred and violence confined to what used to be called "the dark parts of town". The real problem is that revolutionary socialism doesn't have an answer to this - apparently your mental health problems are cured "in the struggle", but that is surely disproved by the incredible narcissistic feuding and tribalistic dominance rituals which cripple the actually existing radical left. Nondualist spirituality and Jungian psychology have answers, which work... for individuals who can be disciplined for long periods of time. The thing is that this planet doesn't really have that long.